


Better Than Cassandra

by biichan



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Gen, Jossed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-03-31
Updated: 2005-03-31
Packaged: 2017-10-07 09:14:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/63651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biichan/pseuds/biichan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermione always knew she was adopted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Better Than Cassandra

i.

She knew she was adopted of course. Her parents had told her about it when she was old enough, which happened to be at the age of nine. Mum couldn't have children, so they'd gone to the agency and eventually they'd got Hermione. Hermione was an older baby—nearly a year old when they took her home—but her eyes were bright and intelligent and she had a full head of brown hair.

She'd been beautiful, her mother had told her. Sometimes she even believed that.

She'd thought about finding her birth-mother sometimes. Didn't all adopted children do that? But even the agency had claimed she'd been given to them nameless and in the end she accepted that for the mystery it was and set herself to solving all the others she could find.

When the Hogwarts letter came, she wondered if she'd been born to a witch. But she never said anything to anyone. It wasn't worth digging up old ghosts.

ii.

Patricia had been a pretty baby and it had hurt to give her away. But she couldn't teach and be a mother and it had taken Sybill everything she had just to get the job. And if she gave the child to the Muggles… well, better she grow up in a world where she wouldn't be the bastard child of a unmarried half-blood fortune teller and her married one-time lover. Life as a Muggleborn was preferable to that.

But still, it had been an ache in her heart and she spent the weekend weeping in her cramped little flat, weeping and pouring out her woes into the cooking sherry.

iii.

She thought she saw Patricia at the sorting. A short little frizzy haired girl and the hat took nearly a minute to place her in GRYFFINDOR. Sybill had frowned. She'd wanted Patricia to be in her own House.

Hermione had felt the eyes at the back of her neck and she turned to look at the head table. There was a professor staring at her, one dressed like a gipsy. The look on the woman's face was enough to make Hermione shiver. She knew this woman and she didn't know how.

Hermione was good at knowing without knowing. _Cassandra_, she thought suddenly, _Cassandra of fitful prophecy._ It was enough to make her shiver again.

iv.

Patricia (for she couldn't think the girl was any other) was in her class this year and it was an agony. She didn't believe, not any of it, and she was always making rude comments to Potter and Weasley when she thought Sybill couldn't hear. It was enough to break a glass heart and Sybill's did—she spent classes with the third-years walking over the shards.

Perhaps she wasn't Patricia. Perhaps she was just another Muggleborn girl, too smart for her own good.

It did make Sybill feel better to answer her jibes with ones of her own.

And then the Granger girl (Patricia, she told herself and then, Not Patricia) walked out of her classroom and it felt as if a shroud had been lifted from her eyes and she pulled Lavender and Parvati toward her, buried her face in their hair.

Her children, she thought. By love and not blood.

v.

Hermione never thought she'd go to see Trelawney out of her own free will, but politics make for strange bedfellows and Dolores Umbridge made for the strangest of all. She brought neither tea nor a bottle of sherry but a pitcher of good strong milk, enchanted not to spill as she climbed her way to Trelawney's tower chambers.

They were a mess, but Hermione hadn't expected any better. She was surprised that Trelawney still possessed the ability to leave her bed.

"Parvati and Lavender miss you," she said softly as she poured the milk. There were biscuits in a tin on the table—the (former) professor had managed to hunt it up after she'd been told they would have tea together, so to say. "They're fond of Firenze, of course, but he's nothing like you. Even if he is handsome for a centaur."

"My daughters," Trelawney said quietly, her voice hoarse from disuse. "They were my daughters."

Hermione nodded. This… this she knew, somehow.

"I had a daughter once," Trelawney whispered. Her hands were shaking. "For a few months. Once."

Hermione took her hand and the shaking stilled. "I was adopted," she replied and somehow she knew this was important to say.

"Patricia," Trelawney murmured and she tangled her other hand in Hermione's hair. "Patricia."

Hermione tried the name on inside her head. At least it was better than Cassandra.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by all those fics where Hermione finds out she was adopted and isn't actually a Muggleborn after all. I just figured that if we were going to make Hermione someone's secret daughter, it might as well be the character she most physically resembles in canon.


End file.
